NME today reports: “Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Order master tapes when digging up the basement of a new restaurant in Manchester.” Oh, also! They found guns and gold stashed away down there, too. (thanks, Michael Donaldson)

Caged crinoline, also known as a hoop skirt, was the most distinctive silhouette of the late 19th century. This photo shows a hoop skirt, named because of its series of concentric hoops of whalebone or cane. It replaced the popular petticoat of the late 1500s to mid 1800s.
Multiple petticoats were sometimes worn to create the full, dome-shape, small-waist silhouette popular in women’s fashion through the mid 1800s. During the late 1800s, hoop skirts like this one lightened the weight of multiple petticoats by creating the same fashionable silhouette but with fewer layers. It only required one or two petticoats worn over the hoop skirt.
Unlike shaping undergarments before the 19th century, hoop skirts were worn by women of every social class.
In 1846, David Hough Jr. introduced the first hoop skirt in the U.S.
The hoop-skirt form, like the bustle and corset, gives insight into the complexities of dress in the 19th century.
This item is one of 137 million artifacts, works of art and specimens in the Smithsonian’s collection. It is not on display.

gmoke sez, “Post an Instructable on how to turn a virtual item into a tangible object by April 30, win $100,000 in 3D printing tech and supplies. Examples include 3D printed objects, laser-cut files, and even printed decals using an inkjet printer.”

“>Foster Kamer at Betabeat writes: “Apple released an announcement today explaining that the Fair Labor Association will be conducting an independent audit that is ‘unprecedented in size and scale’ in the electronics industry. As part of it, they contend that they’ll be interviewing thousands of Foxconn employees, and that the FLA will be taking the ‘unusual’ step of identifying the individual factories audited in their report.”

Tompkins Square records have released an exquisitely-curated collection of pre-war music exploring the timeless themes of love — found and lost. Aimer et Perdre: To Love & To Lose, Songs, 1917-1934 is double CD set featuring music from the Cajun bayous, America’s countryside, the Ukraine, and other locales near and far. You may recall that Tompkins Square are the creators of the excellent This May Be My Last Time Singing gospel compilation and also the critically-acclaimed To What Strange Place: The Music Of The Ottoman-American Diaspora 1916-1929. Produced by Christopher King and Susan Archie, Aimer et Perdre continues in the Tomkpkins tradition of releasing excellent and mostly unheard music, contextualized with insightful liner notes in beautiful packaging. And as you may have noticed from the image above, Aimer et Perdre is illustrated on the outside (and inside) with original art by the one-and-only R. Crumb. Listen to the whole first disc below. Happy Valentine’s Day!

In this post, I’d like to draw special attention to a feature on the site about a subject with which I have personal familiarity: violence against indigenous women in Guatemala. Though the country’s long civil war is over, the femicidio is not. Snip:

More than 100,000 women were raped in the 36 years of the Guatemalan genocide in which at least 200,000 people died.
In this video, photojournalists Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita interview survivors and document the ongoing forensic and legal investigation that has just indicted former Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt.

There are so many powerful stories on the Women Under Siege website. Below, a photo by Ms. Addario, from Congo: “Lwange, 51, with her daughter, Florida, who had been raped the week before this photo was taken in 2008. The child had screamed at the time, then bled. With her vagina and her young psyche damaged, Florida would no longer speak.”